Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Time's Too Short, The Hollow Man

High and low. Why not, I ask, make poetry out of the lowbrow stuff too? My emotional life is all over the map, from resentment to the highest forms of love. I discovered long ago that many paradoxical things live in me. You would think the one precludes the other, but not so. Time separates them and in that way emotions coexist in me. I often can't do more than one thing at a time, but then this is not always true.

I have noticed every time someone dies, the critters in my life, and the people, I often have many emotions at the same time as the grief. It was really amazing, and I would hope for all of you that you get the chance to experience heart breaking grief and fierce joy at the same time as I once did, back in 1983. What a remarkable few minutes that was. It didn't last long, but it was certainly God given.

And of course, as a believer in fantasy, I also can write stories, as I have posted before - truths that are not facts, or perhaps truths that are more than facts. I don't feel like a hollow man these days. Believe me, I have been places.

The View From The Northern Wall

Some years ago my poetry took on a mythic flavor and I became a character in my own poems, a mage, "the man of the Northern Wall". This apellation is not completely fictional. My middle name is Noordwal, a Dutch term for north wall, though in current Dutch it mainly means north bank as in riverbank. I was told that an ancestor, a Portugese Jew escaping the Inquisition, settled in a small Dutch town and took this name from where he settled, near the north wall of the town. I have thought for a long time that -wal meant wall, think my mother told me that. A linguist might say that my usage is no longer common, is an older usage, but then the Inquisition happened in Portugal a few centuries ago, right around the time the Moors lost control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Jews lost the modest protection given them by Islam. Now I write as this mage, my poetry persona.